Posted
by
timothy
on Sunday January 27, 2013 @04:40PM
from the cultural-literacy dept.

theodp writes "That his 28-year-old whip-smart, well-educated CS grad friend could be unaware of MacWrite and MacPaint took Dave Winer by surprise. 'They don't, for some reason,' notes Winer, 'study these [types of seminal] products in computer science. They fall between the cracks of "serious" study of algorithms and data structures, and user interface and user experience (which still is not much-studied, but at least is starting). This is more the history of software. Much like the history of film, or the history of rock and roll.' So, Dave asks, what early software was influential and worthy of a Software Hall of Fame?"

Learn C to learn how things really work for the last few decades in the kernel and library spaces, learn the original specs of HTML to understand what Hypertext was really for, and learn C-Kermit to learn what configuraiton and control over a limited interface really means.

TUTOR [wikipedia.org] (also known as PLATO Author Language) is a programming language developed for use on the PLATO system at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign around 1965. TUTOR was initially designed by Paul Tenczar for use in computer assisted instruction (CAI) and computer managed instruction (CMI) (in computer programs called "lessons") and has many features for that purpose. For example, TUTOR has powerful answer-parsing and answer-judging commands, graphics, and features to simplify handling student records and statistics by instructors. TUTOR's flexibility, in combination with PLATO's computational power (running on what was considered a supercomputer in 1972), also made it suitable for the creation of many non-educational lessons - that is, games - including flight simulators, war games, dungeon style multiplayer role-playing games, card games, word games, and Medical lesson games such as Bugs and Drugs (BND).

1994 Message from CS Prof Daniel Sleator to Tim Berners-Lee [archive.org]: It would be possible for one person to write a new game (such as double bughouse chess) without having to write a half dozen graphics interfaces. Many really cool things change from being impossible to being quite feasible. (The PLATO system developed in the 70s at the University of Illinois had some of these properties: simple graphics available to all users, fast interaction among a large pool of users. The result was the development of a number of very popular and engrossing interactive games.)

I'm not sure Turbo Pascal's legacy is as influential as it should have been. Sure, plenty of modern IDEs owe a nod to TP, but what about the compiler? The thing was shockingly fast. I wish TP had been more influential in that regard.

Some interesting info about how Turbo Pascal's speed was achieved here [hubpages.com].

Lightwave and the rest of the Video Toaster studio software was influential in that for the first time, you could have a quality video studio stuffed in a single computer. A lot of UHF and independent stations used 'em.

Byte is kind of the journal of note of the microcomputer era from 1975 to the early '90s (when it became just a bunch of boring reviews). I'm sure anyone who wanted a list of influential software from the past could spend a couple of weeks digging through them. You can find most of the early years as scanned.PDF files if you know where to look.

And don't forget to cover some of the important failures too, like The One[tm], Visi-On, and Lotus Jazz. And the important semi-failures like Smalltalk and OS/2.

Tell me, Microsoft, what games of YOURS are still being played 20 to 30 years later?

Well, Microsoft Flight Simulator was launched in 1982, that is almost 35 years ago; Solitaire came with Windows 3.0, in 1990 (and believe me, there are many more people still playing Solitaire than ever played Colossal Cave or Zork). Minesweeper was originally part of the MS Entertainment Pack (also 1990) but was bundled with Windows I believe starting with Windows for Workgroups. Freecell came a bit later, can't remember exactly when, but was there before Win95, which makes it at least 18 years old, I'm sure there are more.